After losing its appeal against a whopping $200 Million verdict of patent-infringement, which was successfully won by a Canadian company, world's giant software manufacturer, Microsoft Corp. will now be altering its much popular Word software.

The Redmond based company has been given until January 11 to make all the required changes or stop the sales all together, in a ruling that was passed yesterday by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington. Word, which is currently used by an estimated 500 million users worldwide, is a part of Microsoft's Office software.

The Court supported and upheld a verdict that has now managed to grow to a whopping $290 Million and has been won by a closely held firm, I4i LP of Toronto.

The dispute, reportedly, is over an "invention related to customizing extensible markup language, or XML", which is a way of encoding data to successfully enable exchanging of information among different programs. In its defense, Microsoft has termed it an "obscure functionality".

New copies of Word 2007 and Office 2007, with the required alterations, will be available starting January 11.